Pitchmarks #86 - "Froggy Valentine’s"

Christina Rossetti wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter” as a Christmas carol, originally. In fact, the first time it appeared, now over 150 years ago, it was titled “A Christmas Carol”. Perhaps December 1871 was a particularly chilly edition of the British winter, but at least there are some things to bring us cheer at Christmas, “water like a stone” or not. Brandy, for example. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, then exploding, if you forgot to score them.

By the middle of February, though, things can’t get a lot bleaker. The cold is now deep within my bones, a chill that is hard to shift. Outside, the gutters strain and the drains groan, and when it isn’t pouring, we’ve hail instead. The golf courses are closed as often as open, and the football pitches, already free of grass, might well be where Rossetti found the line “earth hard as stone”. At least when the match is off, the parents don’t perish on the touchline, although there’s not so much else to do.

You get the picture; it’s grim. But then…somewhere around the human equivalent, a shift is in the air in the garden: “Froggy Valentine’s”. We have a couple of small ponds, not really big enough to fall into, though various family members have tried. And surveillance starts in the starry evenings, from under multiple hats and coats. We strain our ears through the silence for the moment when a purring sound announces that hibernation is over, and at some point, there will appear in the left hand pond some clumps of frogspawn - this year five, so far - and in the Pennell household, this is the moment when we start to believe that we might survive this damn winter after all, and live to see another spring.

Rossetti also wrote of “Spring”, presumably when she had herself either thawed out or found frogspawn - “There is no time like Spring, When life's alive in everything”, and though that magic state is still some way off, we now trust it will come, and everything seems that much easier. And that I found that earlier poem in a volume my late father gave me brings me joy, for he too - a lifelong allotment gardener, pipe in one hand and fork in t’other - struggled to get through the winters, and one year didn’t. But winter was when he planned - he bought his seeds and cleaned his tools, when tools still had wooden handles. And then one day, something would tell him that spring was nigh, and that things would grow, and that cycle of the gardener’s life, which connected him to my wife in the same way as his love of poetry did to me, just kept on going, for another year’s harvest at least.

So, Froggy Valentine’s has been and gone, and early up on Cleeve Hill, I am not the only one singing, for the first skylarks have arrived, along with the rising sun, and there is much to look forward to in the fields of vegetables and golf. I shall now polish my tools in preparation; rubbing linseed oil into the hickory like some strange echo of my father’s own careful maintenance. And I shall finally strike off at Kilspindie soon, and stroll at St Andrews, and tune in for Augusta, and later for Royal Portrush - oh, sweet gorgeous Dunluce.

And we shall find a breeze that is no longer Arctic in our hair, and feel the sun on our backs, and hope that bright afternoon light hangs on forever, for those days, those adventures will make us feel alive, and happy. And a good deal warmer.

Bless the frogs. Our season is coming.